Silas Marner by George Eliot (popular books to read .TXT) 📖

each alternative on his future lot. No, not quite unconscious of everything else. Deeper down, and half-smothered by passionate desire and dread, there was the sense that he ought not to be waiting on these alternatives; that he ought to accept the consequences of his deeds, own the miserable wife, and fulfil the claims of the helpless child. But he had not moral courage enough to contemplate that active renunciation of Nancy as possible for him: he had only conscience and heart enough to make him for ever uneasy under the weakness that forbade the renunciation. And at this moment his mind leaped away from all restraint toward the sudden prospect of deliverance from his long bondage.

“Is she dead?” said the voice that predominated over every other within him. “If she is, I may marry Nancy; and then I shall be a good fellow in future, and have no secrets, and the child—shall be taken care of somehow.” But across that vision came the other possibility—“She may live, and then it’s all up with me.”

Godfrey never knew how long it was before the door of the cottage opened and Mr. Kimble came out. He went forward to meet his uncle, prepared to suppress the agitation he must feel, whatever news he was to hear.

“I waited for you, as I’d come so far,” he said, speaking first.

“Pooh, it was nonsense for you to come out: why didn’t you send one of the men? There’s nothing to be done. She’s dead—has been dead for hours, I should say.”

“What sort of woman is she?” said Godfrey, feeling the blood rush to his face.

“A young woman, but emaciated, with long black hair. Some vagrant—

quite in rags. She’s got a wedding-ring on, however. They must fetch her away to the workhouse to-morrow. Come, come along.”

“I want to look at her,” said Godfrey. “I think I saw such a woman yesterday. I’ll overtake you in a minute or two.”

Mr. Kimble went on, and Godfrey turned back to the cottage. He cast only one glance at the dead face on the pillow, which Dolly had smoothed with decent care; but he remembered that last look at his unhappy hated wife so well, that at the end of sixteen years every line in the worn face was present to him when he told the full story of this night.

He turned immediately towards the hearth, where Silas Marner sat lulling the child. She was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep—

only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky—before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway. The wide-open blue eyes looked up at Godfrey’s without any uneasiness or sign of recognition: the child could make no visible audible claim on its father; and the father felt a strange mixture of feelings, a conflict of regret and joy, that the pulse of that little heart had no response for the half-jealous yearning in his own, when the blue eyes turned away from him slowly, and fixed themselves on the weaver’s queer face, which was bent low down to look at them, while the small hand began to pull Marner’s withered cheek with loving disfiguration.

“You’ll take the child to the parish to-morrow?” asked Godfrey, speaking as indifferently as he could.

“Who says so?” said Marner, sharply. “Will they make me take her?”

“Why, you wouldn’t like to keep her, should you—an old bachelor like you?”

“Till anybody shows they’ve a right to take her away from me,”

said Marner. “The mother’s dead, and I reckon it’s got no father: it’s a lone thing—and I’m a lone thing. My money’s gone, I don’t know where—and this is come from I don’t know where. I know nothing—I’m partly mazed.”

“Poor little thing!” said Godfrey. “Let me give something towards finding it clothes.”

He had put his hand in his pocket and found half-a-guinea, and, thrusting it into Silas’s hand, he hurried out of the cottage to overtake Mr. Kimble.

“Ah, I see it’s not the same woman I saw,” he said, as he came up.

“It’s a pretty little child: the old fellow seems to want to keep it; that’s strange for a miser like him. But I gave him a trifle to help him out: the parish isn’t likely to quarrel with him for the right to keep the child.”

“No; but I’ve seen the time when I might have quarrelled with him for it myself. It’s too late now, though. If the child ran into the fire, your aunt’s too fat to overtake it: she could only sit and grunt like an alarmed sow. But what a fool you are, Godfrey, to come out in your dancing shoes and stockings in this way—and you one of the beaux of the evening, and at your own house! What do you mean by such freaks, young fellow? Has Miss Nancy been cruel, and do you want to spite her by spoiling your pumps?”

“Oh, everything has been disagreeable to-night. I was tired to death of jigging and gallanting, and that bother about the hornpipes. And I’d got to dance with the other Miss Gunn,” said Godfrey, glad of the subterfuge his uncle had suggested to him.

The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.

Godfrey reappeared in the White Parlour with dry feet, and, since the truth must be told, with a sense of relief and gladness that was too strong for painful thoughts to struggle with. For could he not venture now, whenever opportunity offered, to say the tenderest things to Nancy Lammeter—to promise her and himself that he would always be just what she would desire to see him? There was no danger that his dead wife would be recognized: those were not days of active inquiry and wide report; and as for the registry of their marriage, that was a long way off, buried in unturned pages, away from every one’s interest but his own. Dunsey might betray him if he came back; but Dunsey might be won to silence.

And when events turn out so much better for a man than he has had reason to dread, is it not a proof that his conduct has been less foolish and blameworthy than it might otherwise have appeared? When we are treated well, we naturally begin to think that we are not altogether unmeritorious, and that it is only just we should treat ourselves well, and not mar our own good fortune. Where, after all, would be the use of his confessing the past to Nancy Lammeter, and throwing away his happiness?—nay, hers? for he felt some confidence that she loved him. As for the child, he would see that it was cared for: he would never forsake it; he would do everything but own it. Perhaps it would be just as happy in life without being owned by its father, seeing that nobody could tell how things would turn out, and that—is there any other reason wanted?—well, then, that the father would be much happier without owning the child.